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Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Competing Visions

Rush
Limbaugh gave a very good presentation today on why what passes for
conservatism in America
is nothing of the sort.Consider what he
praises:ruthlessness, brutal
competition, big corporations, the Rockefellers (some of the biggest supporters
of Globalism out there), restlessness, unquestioning support of new technology,
etc.Note especially the apt pairing at
the end of one of his sentences:

And so Tillerson is described here as working at
Exxon, which is the direct descendant of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil,
which is organized on the principles of
ruthless capitalism and Protestant faith [emphasis added--W.G.].

Here
is some more from Mr Limbaugh:

. . .

Now,
ExxonMobil is part of the Rockefeller oil monopoly -- Standard Oil -- and it is
said that of all the oil companies that resulted from the breakup of Standard
Oil, that Exxon is culturally the closest to John D. Rockefeller and the way he
ran Standard Oil, which means that ExxonMobil is organized on principles of
capitalism. Mr. Coll describes it as ruthless capitalism. I think all of
capitalism is ruthless. This is just what people don't know.
Competition, real competition for sales of anything, competition for ideas,
competition is ruthless, period.

It's
not ruthless to people that doesn't like it. It's not ruthless to people
don't compete. But it can be brutal. And it's not a bad
thing. Competition is where innovation comes from. Competition is
where leadership comes from. Don't misunderstand. I'm not a person
that sees perfection in things. Everything has its problems and
faults. No individual is perfect. No group of people is
perfect. But I am not one who believes that capitalism is flawed by
virtue of its existence. The left is.

The
cutthroat capitalism, just to bring it down to an understandable level, the
cutthroat capitalism in high-tech would boggle your mind. The cutthroat
competition in capitalism going on between Apple and Samsung or Apple and
Google or Google and Microsoft, it's brutal, folks. You oftentimes don't
see it, but it is. And it's certainly brutal in the oil industry, in the
energy field. And so Tillerson is described here as working at Exxon,
which is the direct descendant of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, which is
organized on the principles of ruthless capitalism and Protestant faith.

. . .

So Exxon hires a bunch of former government workers
to help it do business. It hires former CIA agents. It hires former
State Department employees. Exxon hires people that used to work in the
Pentagon. This is serious business. The oil business is serious business.
The world could not survive without oil. Our world as we know it could
not survive. The United
States standard of living would plummet if
the left succeeded in getting rid of oil. Airplanes would not fly.
Automobiles would cease to be useful. You couldn't heat or air condition
your home for long.

Getting rid of oil would take us back to the 17th
or 18th century. It would be an absolute disaster. It is serious
business! Oil is also a very serious geopolitical issue. It's not
just a game. It's not just oil wells and J.R. Ewing in Dallas. It is very, very serious -- and it's
highly competitive. It's cutthroat competitive. You can't make
oil. You have to go find it where nature has made it. In some
places, it's hard to get it. Other places, it's easy. There's all
kinds of competition to get it. Everybody wants to have as much of it as
they can.

. . . We
need people who look at America
and love it. We need people who love and respect America and believe that America's
greatness is the best thing for the world, because it is. It always has
been.

That's not a braggadocios statement. We are
the people of the world who, because of our freedom, have created a standard of
living and a technological innovation record of progress unlike any that has
ever been seen, and it is because of our documented freedom in the founding of
our country, the belief in the power of individuals pursuing excellence and the
best they can be. Doers, shakers, people that make things happen.
As opposed to people who look at the United States and think that it's
the problem in the world.

Over
against this is the Christian agrarian tradition (which would rejoice at a
return to the ‘backward’ 17th or 18th hundredyears), of
which the South partook in great measure in her better days and which also
finds good expression in many ways in the Japanesse farmer and writer Masanobu
Fukuoka.We invite all to listen to his
wisdom in this video